Greater Britain

CHAPTER IV.
BENARES

IN the comparative cool of early morning, I sallied out on a stroll through the outskirts of Benares. Thousands of women were stepping gracefully along the crowded roads, bearing on their heads the water-jars, while at every few paces there was a well, at which hundreds were waiting along with the bheesties their turn for lowering their bright gleaming copper cups to the well-water to fill their skins or vases. All were keeping up a continual chatter, women with women, men with men: all the tongues were running ceaselessly. It is astonishing to see the indignation that a trifling mishap creates – such gesticulation, such shouting, and loud talk, you would think that murder at least was in question. The world cannot show the Hindoo‘s equal as a babbler; the women talk while they grind corn, the men while they smoke their water-pipes; your true Hindoo is never quiet; when not talking, he is playing on his tomtom.

The Doorgha Khond, the famed Temple of the Sacred Monkeys, I found thronged with worshipers, and garlanded in every part with roses: it overhangs one of the best holy tanks in India, but has not much beauty or grandeur, and is chiefly remarkable for the swarms of huge, fat-paunched, yellow-bearded, holy monkeys, whose outposts hold one quarter of the city, and whose main body forms a living roof to the temple. A singular contrast to the Doorgha Khond was the Queen‘s College for native students, built in a mixture of Tudor and Hindoo architecture. The view from the roof is noticeable, depending as it does for its beauty on the mingling of the rich green of the timber with the gay colors of the painted native huts. Over the trees are seen the minarets at the river-side, and an unwonted life was given to the view by the smoke and flames that were rising from two burning huts, in widely-separated districts of the native town. It is said that the natives, whenever they quarrel with their neighbors, always take the first opportunity of firing their huts; but in truth the huts in the hot weather almost fire themselves, so inflammable are their roofs and sides.

When the sun had declined sufficiently to admit of another excursion, I started from my bungalow, and, passing through the elephant-corral, went down with a guide to the ghauts, the observatory of Jai Singh, and the Golden Temple. From the minarets of the mosque of Aurungzebe I had a lovely sunset view of the ghauts, the city, and the Ganges; but the real sight of Benares, after all, lies in a walk through the tortuous passages that do duty for streets. No carriages can pass them, they are so narrow. You walk preceded by your guide, who warns the people, that they may stand aside and not be defiled by your touch, for that is the real secret of the apparent respect paid to you in Benares; but the sacred cows are so numerous and so obstinate that you cannot avoid sometimes jostling them. The scene in the passages is the most Indian in India. The gaudy dresses of the Hindoo princes spending a week in purification at the holy place, the frescoed fronts of the shops and houses, the deafening beating of the tomtoms, and, above all, the smoke and sickening smell from the “burning ghauts” that meets you, mingled with a sweeter smell of burning spices, as you work your way through the vast crowds of pilgrims who are pouring up from the river‘s bank – all alike are strange to the English traveler, and fill his mind with that indescribable awe which everywhere accompanies the sight of scenes and ceremonies that we do not understand. When once you are on the Ganges bank itself, the scene is wilder still: – a river front of some three miles, faced with lofty ghauts, or flights of river stairs, over which rise, pile above pile, in sublime confusion, lofty palaces with oriel windows hanging over the sacred stream; observatories with giant sun-dials, gilt domes (golden, the story runs), and silver minarets. On the ghauts, rows of fires, each with a smouldering body; on the river, boat-loads of pilgrims, and fakeers praying while they float; under the houses, lines of prostrate bodies – those of the sick – brought to the sacred Ganges to die – or, say our government spies, to be murdered by suffocation with sacred mud; while prowling about are the wolf-like fanatics who feed on putrid flesh. The whole is lit by a sickly sun fitfully glaring through the smoke, while the Ganges stream is half obscured by the river fog and reek of the hot earth.

The lofty pavilions that crown the river front are ornamented with paintings of every beast that walks and bird that flies, with monsters, too – pink and green and spotted – with griffins, dragons, and elephant-headed gods embracing dancing-girls. Here and there are representations of red-coated soldiers – English, it would seem, for they have white faces, but so, the Maories say, have the New Zealand fairies, who are certainly not British. The Benares taste for painting leads to the decoration with pink and yellow spots of the very cows. The tiger is the commonest of all the figures on the walls – indeed, the explanation that the representations are allegorical, or that gods are pictured in tiger shape, has not removed from my mind the belief that the tiger must have been worshiped in India at some early date. All Easterns are inclined to worship the beasts that eat them: the Javanese light floating sacrifices to their river crocodiles; the Scindees at Kurrachee venerate the sacred muggur, or man-eating alligator; the hill-tribes pray to snakes; indeed, to a new-comer, all Indian religion has the air of devil-worship, or worship of the destructive principle in some shape: the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are propitiated by infernal music, they are often worshiped with obscene and hideous rites. There is even something cruel in the monotonous roar of the great tomtoms; the sound seems to connect itself with widow-burning, with child-murder, with Juggernauth processions. Since the earliest known times, the tomtom has been used to drown the cries of tortured fanatics; its booming is bound up with the thousand barbarisms of false religion. If the scene on the Benares ghauts is full of horrors, we must not forget that Hindooism is a creed of fear and horror, not of love.

The government of India has lately instituted an inquiry into the alleged abuses of the custom of taking sick Hindoos to the Ganges-side to die, with a view to regulating or suppressing the practice which prevails in the river-side portion of Lower Bengal. At Benares, Bengal people are still taken to the river-side, but not so other natives, as Hindoos dying anywhere in the sacred city have all the blessings which the most holy death can possibly secure; the Benares Shastra, moreover, forbids the practice, and I saw but two cases of it in the city, although I had seen many near Calcutta. Not only are aged people brought from their sick-rooms, laid in the burning sun, and half suffocated with the Ganges water poured down their throats, but, owing to the ridicule which follows if they recover, or the selfishness of their relatives, the water is often muddier than it need be: hence the phrase “ghaut murder,” by which this custom is generally known. Similar customs are not unheard of in other parts of India, and even in Polynesia and North America. The Veddahs, or black aborigines of Ceylon, were, up to very lately, in the habit of carrying their dying parents or children into the jungle, and, having placed a chatty of water and some rice by their side, leaving them to be devoured by wild beasts. Under pressure from our officials, they are believed to have ceased to act thus, but they continue, we are told, to throw their dead to the leopards and crocodiles. The Maories, too, have a way of taking out to die alone those whom their seers have pronounced doomed men, but it is probable that, among the rude races, the custom which seems to be a relic of human sacrifice has not been so grossly abused as it has been by the Bengal Hindoos. The practice of Ganjatra is but one out of many similar barbarities that disgrace the religion of the Hindoos, but it is fast sharing the fate of suttee and infanticide.

As I returned through the bazaar, I met many most unholy-looking visitors to the sacred town. Fierce Rajpoots, with enormous turbans ornamented with zig-zag stripes: Bengal bankers, in large purple turbans, curling their long white mustaches, and bearing their critical noses high aloft as they daintily picked their way over the garbage of the streets; and savage retainers of the rajahs staying for a season at their city palaces, were to the traveler‘s eye no very devout pilgrims. In truth, the immoralities of the “holy city” are as great as its religious virtues, and it is the chosen ground of the loose characters as well as of the pilgrims of the Hindoo world.

In the whole of the great throng in the bazaar, hardly the slightest trace of European dressing was to be perceived: the varnished boots of the wealthier Hindoos alone bore witness to the existence of English trade – a singular piece of testimony, this, to the essential conservatism of the Oriental mind. With any quantity of old army clothing to be got for the asking, you never see a rag of it on a native back – not even on that of the poorest coolie. If you give a blanket to an out-door servant, he will cut it into strips and wear them as a puggree round his head; but this is about the only thing he will accept, unless to sell it in the bazaar.

As I stopped to look for a moment at the long trains of laden camels that were winding slowly through the tortuous streets, I saw a European soldier cheapening a bracelet with a native jeweler. He was the first topee wallah (“hat-fellow,” or “European”) that I had seen in Benares City. Calcutta is the only town in Northern India in which you meet Europeans in your walks or rides, and, even there, there is but one European to every sixty natives. In all India, there are, including troops, children, and officials of all kinds, far less than as many thousands of Europeans as there are millions of natives.

The evening after that on which I visited the native town, I saw in Secrole cantonments, near Benares, the India hated and dreaded by our troops – by day a blazing deadly heat and sun, at night a still more deadly fog – a hot white fog, into which the sun disappears half an hour before his time for setting, and out of which he shoots soon after seven in the morning, to blaze and kill again – a pestiferous fever-breeding ground-fog, out of which stand the tops of the palms, though their stems are invisible in the steam. Compared with our English summer climate, it seems the atmosphere of another planet.

Among the men in the cantonments, I found much of that demoralization that heat everywhere produces among Englishmen. The newly-arrived soldiers appear to pass their days in alternate trials of hard drinking and of total abstinence, and are continually in a state of nervous fright, which in time must wear them out and make them an easy prey to fever. The officers who are fresh from England often behave in much the same manner as the men, though with them “belatee pawnee” takes the place of plain water with the brandy. “Belatee pawnee” means, being translated, “English water,” but, when interpreted, it means “soda-water” – the natives once believing that this was English river-water, bottled and brought to India by us as they carry Ganges water to the remotest parts. The superstition is now at an end, owing to the fact that natives are themselves largely employed in the making of soda-water, which is cheaper in India than it is at home; but the name remains.

Our men kill themselves with beer, with brandy and soda-water, and with careless inattention to night chills, and then blame the poor climate for their fevers, or die cursing “India.” Of course, long residence in a climate winterless and always hot at mid-day produces or intensifies certain diseases; but brandy and soda-water produces more, and intensifies all. They say it is “soda-and-brandy” the first month, and then “brandy-and-soda,” but that men finally take to putting in the soda-water first, and then somehow the brandy always kills them. If a man wears a flannel belt and thick clothes when he travels by night, and drinks hot tea, he need not fear India.

In all ways, Benares is the type of India; in the Secrole cantonments, you have the English in India, intelligent enough, but careless, and more English than they are at home, with garrison chaplains, picnics, balls, and champagne suppers; hard by, in the native town, the fierce side of Hindooism, and streets for an Englishman to show himself in which ten years ago was almost certain death. Benares is the center of all the political intrigues of India; but the great mutiny itself was hatched there without being heard of at Secrole. Except that our policemen now perambulate the town, change in Benares there has been none. Were missionaries to appear openly in its streets, their fate would still very possibly be the same as that which in this city befell St. Thomas.

CHAPTER V.
CASTE

ONE of the greatest difficulties with which the British have to contend in Hindostan is how to discover the tendencies, how to follow the changes, of native opinion. Your Hindoo is so complaisant a companion, that, whether he is your servant at threepence a day, or the ruler of the State in which you dwell, he is perpetually striving to make his opinions the reflex of your own. You are engaged in a continual struggle to prevent your views from being seen, in order that you may get at his: in this you always fail; a slight hint is enough for a Hindoo, and, if he cannot find even that much of suggestion in your words, he confines himself to commonplace. We should see in this, not so much one of the forms assumed by the cringing slavishness born of centuries of subjection, not so much an example of Oriental cunning, as of the polish of Eastern manners. Even in our rude country it is hardly courteous, whatever your opinions, flatly to contradict the man with whom you happen to be talking; with the Hindoo, it is the height of ill breeding so much as to differ from him. The results of the practice are deplorable; our utter ignorance of the secret history of the rebellion of 1857 is an example of its working, for there must have been a time, before discontent ripened into conspiracy, when we might have been advised and warned. The native newspapers are worse than useless to us; accepted as exponents of Hindoo views by those who know no better, and founded mostly by British capital, they are at once incapable of directing and of acting as indexes to native opinion, and express only the sentiments of half a dozen small merchants at the presidency towns, who give the tone to some two or three papers, which are copied and followed by the remainder.

The result of this difficulty in discovering native opinion is that our officers, however careful, however considerate in their bearing toward the natives, daily wound the feelings of the people who are under their care by acts which, though done in a praiseworthy spirit, appear to the natives deeds of gross stupidity or of outrageous despotism. It is hopeless to attempt to conciliate, it is impossible so much as to govern unless by main force continually displayed, an Eastern people in whose religious thought we are not deeply learned.

Not only are we unacquainted with the feelings of the people, but we are lamentably ignorant of the simplest facts about their religions, their wealth, and their occupations, for no census of all India has yet been taken. A complete census had, indeed, been taken, not long before my visit, in Central India, and another in the Northwest Provinces, but none in Madras, Bombay, the Punjaub, or Bengal. The difficulties in the way of the officials who carried through the arrangements for the two that had been taken were singularly great. In the Central Provinces, the census-papers had to be prepared in five languages; both here and in the Northwest, the purely scientific nature of the inquiry had to be brought home to the minds of the people. In Central India the hill-tribes believed that our object in the census was to pave the way for the collection of the unmarried girls as companions for our wifeless soldiers, so all began marrying forthwith. In the Northwest, the natives took it into their heads that our object was to see how many able-bodied men would be available for a war against Russia, and to collect a poll-tax to pay for the expedition. The numerous tribes that are habitually guilty of infanticide threw every difficulty in the way; Europeans disliked the whole affair, on account of the insult offered to their dignity in ranking them along with natives. It must be admitted, indeed, that the provisions for recording caste distinctions gave an odd shape to the census-papers left at the houses at Secrole, in which European officers were asked to state their “caste or tribe.” The census of the Central Provinces was imperfect enough, but that of the Northwest was the second that had been taken there, and showed signs of scientific arrangement and great care.

The Northwest Provinces include the great towns of Benares, Agra, and Allahabad, and the census fell into my hands at Benares itself, at the Sanscrit College. It was a strange production, and seemed to have brought together a mass of information respecting castes and creeds which was new even to those who had lived long in the Northwest Provinces. All callings in India being hereditary, there were entries recording the presence in certain towns of “hereditary clerks who pray to their inkhorns,” “hereditary beggars,” “hereditary planters of slips or cuttings,” “hereditary grave-diggers,” “hereditary hermits,” and “hereditary hangmen,” for in India a hangmanship descends with as much regularity as a crown. In the single district of the Dehra Valley, there are 1500 “hereditary tomtom men” – drummers at the festivals; 234 Brahmins of Bijnour returned themselves as having for profession “the receipt of presents to avert the influence of evil stars.” In Bijnour, there are also fifteen people of a caste which professes “the pleasing of people by assuming disguises,” while at Benares there is a whole caste – the Bhâts – whose hereditary occupation is to “satirize the enemies of the rich, and to praise their friends.” In the Northwest Provinces, there are 572 distinct castes in all.

The accounts which some castes gave of their origin read strangely in a solemn governmental document: the members of one caste described themselves as “descended from Maicasur, a demon;” but some of the records are less legendary and more historic. One caste in the Dehra Valley sent in a note that they came in 1000 A.D. from the Deccan; another, that they emigrated from Arabia 500 years ago. The Gour Brahmins claim to have been in the district of Moozuffernuggur for 5000 years.

Under the title of “occupations,” the heads of families alone were given, and not the number of those dependent on them, whence it comes that in the whole province only “11,000 tomtom players” were set down. The habits and tastes of the people are easily seen in the entries: “3600 firework manufacturers,” “45 makers of crowns for idols,” “4353 gold-bangle makers,” “29,136 glass-bangle makers,” “1123 astrologers.” There are also 145 “ear-cleaners,” besides “kite-makers,” “ear-piercers,” “pedigree-makers,” “makers of caste-marks,” “cow-dung sellers,” and “hereditary painters of horses with spots.” There was no backwardness in the followers of maligned pursuits: 974 people in Allahabad described themselves as “low blackguards,” 35 as “men who beg with threats of violence,” 25 as “hereditary robbers,” 479,015 as “beggars,” 29 as “howlers at funerals,” 226 as “flatterers for gain;” “vagabonds,” “charmers,” “informers” were all set down, and 1100 returned themselves as “hereditary buffoons,” while 2000 styled themselves “conjurers,” 4000 “acrobats,” and 6372 “poets.” In one district alone, there were 777 “soothsayers and astrologers” by profession.

It is worthy of notice that, although there are in the Northwest Provinces half a million of beggars in a population of thirty millions, they seem never to beg of Europeans – at least, I was not once asked for alms during my stay in India. If the smallest service be performed, there comes a howl of “O Bauks-heece!” from all quarters, but at other times natives seem afraid to beg of Englishmen.

The number of fakeers, soothsayers, charmers, and other “religious” vagabonds is enormous, but the dense ignorance of the people renders them a prey to witchcraft, evil-eye, devil-influence, and all such folly. In Central India, there are whole districts which are looked upon as witch-tracts or haunted places, and which are never approached by man, but set aside as homes for devils. A gentleman who was lately engaged there on the railroad survey found that night after night his men were frightened out of their wits by “fire-fiends,” or blazing demons. He insisted that they should take him to the spot where these strange sights were seen, and to his amazement he, too, saw the fire-devil; at least, he saw a blaze of light moving slowly through the jungle. Gathering himself up for a chase, he rushed at the devil with a club, when the light suddenly disappeared, and instantly shone out from another spot, a hundred yards from the former place. Seeing that there was some trickery at work, he hid himself, and after some hours caught his devil, who, to escape from a sound drubbing, gave an explanation of the whole affair. The man said that the natives of the surveyor‘s party had stolen his mangoes for several nights, but that at last he had hit on a plan for frightening them away. He and his sons went out at dark with pots of blazing oil upon their heads, and, when approached by thieves, the leading one put a cover on his pot, and became invisible, while the second uncovered his. The surveying party got the drubbing, and the devil escaped scot-free; but the surveyor, with short-sighted wisdom, told his men, who had not seen him catch the fire-bearer, that he had had the honor of an interview with the devil himself, who had joyfully informed him of the thefts committed by the men. The surveyor did not admit that he was from this time forward worshiped by his party, but it is not unlikely that such was the case. One of the hill-tribes of Madras worships Colonel Palmer, a British officer who died some seventy years ago, just as Drake was worshiped in America, and Captain Cook in Hawaii. It was one of these tribes that invented the well-known worshiping machine, or “praying-wheel.”

The hill-tribes are less refined, but hardly more ignorant in their fanaticism than are the Hindoos. At Bombay, upon the beach where the dead are buried, or rather tossed to the wild beasts, I saw a filthy and holy Hindoo saint, whose claim to veneration consists in his having spent the whole of the days and portions of the nights for twenty years in a stone box in which he can neither stand, nor lie, nor sit, nor sleep. These saintly fakeers have still much influence with the Hindoo mass, but in old times their power and their insolence were alike unbounded. Agra itself was founded to please one of them. The great Emperor Akbar, who, although a lax Mohammedan, was in no sense a Hindoo, kept nevertheless a Hindoo saint for political purposes, and gave him the foremost position in his train. When the emperor was beginning to fortify Futtehpore Sikri, where he lived, the saint sent for him, and said that the work must be stopped, as the noise disturbed him at his prayers. The emperor offered him new rooms away from the site of the proposed walls, but the saint replied that, whether Akbar went on with his works or no, he should leave Futtehpore. To pacify him, Akbar founded Agra, and dismantled Futtehpore Sikri.

From the census it appears that there are, in the Northwest Provinces, no less than twenty-two newspapers under government inspection, of which five are published at Agra. The circulation of these papers is extremely small, and as the government itself takes 3500 of the 12,000 copies which they issue, its hold over them, without exertion of force, is great. Of the other 8500, 8000 go to native and 500 to European subscribers. All the native papers are skillful at catering for their double public, but those which are printed half in a native tongue and half in English stand in the first rank for unscrupulousness. One of these papers gave, while I was in India, some French speech in abuse of the English. This was headed on the English side, “Interesting Account of the English,” but on the native side, “Excellent Account of the English.” The “English correspondence” and English news of these native papers are so absurdly concocted by the editors out of their own brains that it is a question whether it would not be advisable to send them weekly a column of European news, and even to withhold government patronage from them unless they gave it room, leaving them to qualify and explain the facts as best they could. Their favorite statements are that Russia is going to invade India forthwith, that the Queen has become a Catholic or a Mohammedan, and that the whole population of India is to be converted to Christianity by force. The external appearance of the native papers is sometimes as comical as their matter. The Umritsur Commercial Advertiser, of which nothing is English but the title, gives, for instance, the time-tables of the Punjaub Railway on its back sheet. The page, which is a mere maze of dots and crooked lines, has at the top a cut of a railway train, in which guards apparently cocked-hatted, but probably meant to be wearing pith helmets, are represented sitting on the top of each carriage, with their legs dangling down in front of the windows.

Neither Christianity nor native reformed religions make much show in the Northwestern census. The Christians are strongest in the South of India, the Hindoo reformers in the Punjaub. The Sikhs themselves, and the Kookhas, Nirunkarees, Goolab Dasseas, Naukeeka-punth, and many other Punjaubee sects, all show more or less hostility to caste; but in the Northwest Provinces caste distinctions flourish, although in reality they have no doubt lost strength. The high-caste men are beginning to find their caste a drawback to their success in life, and are given to concealing it. Just as with ourselves kings go incognito when they travel for pleasure, so the Bengal sepoy hides his Brahminical string under his cloth, in order that he may be sent on foreign service without its being known that by crossing the seas he will lose caste.

Judging by the unanimous opinion of the native press on the doings of the Maharajahs of Bombay, and on the licentiousness of the Koolin Brahmins, many of our civilians have come to think that Hindooism in its present shape has lost the support of a large number of the more intelligent Hindoos; but there is little reason to believe that this is the case. In Calcutta, the Church of Hindoo Deists is gaining ground, and one of their leaders is said to have met with some successes during a recent expedition to the Northwest, but of this there is no proof. The little regard that many high-caste natives show for caste except as a matter of talk merely means that caste is less an affair of religion than of custom, but that it is a matter of custom does not show that its force is slight: on the contrary, custom is the lord of India.

The success of Mohammedanism in India should show that caste has never been strong except so far as caste is custom. It is true that the peasants in Orissa starved by the side of the sacred cows, but this was custom too: any one man killing the cow would have been at once killed by his also starving neighbors for breaking custom; but once change the custom by force, and there is no tendency to return to the former state of things. The Portuguese and the Mohammedans alike made converts by compulsion, yet when the pressure was removed there was no return to the earlier faith. Of the nature of caste we had an excellent example in the behavior of the troopers of a Bengal cavalry regiment three weeks before the outbreak of the mutiny of 1857, when they said that for their part they knew that their cartridges were not greased with the fat of cows, but that, as they looked as though they were, it came to the same thing, for they should lose caste if their friends saw them touch the cartridges in question.

It was the cry of infringement of custom that was raised against us by the mutineers: “They aim at subverting our institutions; they have put down the suttee of the Brahmins, the infanticide of the Marattas, caste and adoption are despised; they aim at destroying all our religious customs,” was the most powerful cry that could be raised. It is one against which we shall never be wholly safe; but it is the custom and not the religion which is the people‘s especial care.

There is one point in which caste forms a singular difficulty in our way, which has not yet been brought sufficiently home to us. The comparatively fair treatment which is now extended to the low-caste and no-caste men is itself an insult to the high-caste nobility; and while the no-caste men care little how we treat them, provided we pay them well, and the bunnya, or shop-keeping class, encouraged by the improvement, cry out loudly that the government wrongs them in not treating them as Europeans, the high-caste men are equally disgusted with our good treatment both of middle-class and inferior Hindoos. These things are stumbling-blocks in our way, chiefly because no amount of acquaintance with the various phases of caste feeling is sufficient to bring home its importance to Englishmen. The Indian is essentially the caste man, the Saxon as characteristically the no-caste man, and it is difficult to produce a mutual understanding. Just as in England the people are too democratic for the government, in India the government is too democratic for the people.